a certain failure in criticism of Eugene O'Curry's,--whose business,
after all, was the description and classification of materials rather
than criticism,--let me show, by another example from Eugene O'Curry,
this good influence of Zeuss upon Celtic studies. Eugene O'Curry
wants to establish that compositions of an older date than the
twelfth century existed in Ireland in the twelfth century, and thus
he proceeds. He takes one of the great extant Irish manuscripts, the
Leabhar na h'Uidhre; or, Book of the Dun Cow. The compiler of this
book was, he says, a certain Maelmuiri, a member of the religious
house of Cluainmacnois. This he establishes from a passage in the
manuscript itself: 'This is a trial of his pen here, by Maelmuiri,
son of the son of Conn na m'Bocht.' The date of Maelmuiri he
establishes from a passage in the Annals of the Four Masters, under
the year 1106: 'Maelmuiri, son of the son of Conn na m'Bocht, was
killed in the middle of the great stone church of Cluainmacnois, by a
party of robbers.' Thus he gets the date of the Book of the Dun Cow.
This book contains an elegy on the death of St. Columb. Now, even
before 1106, the language of this elegy was so old as to require a
gloss to make it intelligible, for it is accompanied by a gloss
written between the lines. This gloss quotes, for the explanation of
obsolete words, a number of more ancient compositions; and these
compositions, therefore, must, at the beginning of the twelfth
century, have been still in existence. Nothing can be sounder; every
step is proved, and fairly proved, as one goes along. O'Curry thus
affords a good specimen of the sane mode of proceeding so much wanted
in Celtic researches, and so little practised by Edward Davies and
his brethren; and to found this sane method, Zeuss, by the example he
sets in his own department of philology, has mainly contributed.

Science's reconciling power, too, on which I have already touched,